For conspicuous and appropriate reasons, historians of the twentieth century have been unkind to the phenomenon of nationalism. For similarly conspicuous and appropriate reasons, historians of early twentieth-century Germany have been unkind to its Christian churches. It is therefore not surprising that a book on one such German confession—the Mennonites—takes a dim view of its bid to position itself as a “chosen nation” within the Third Reich.

Benjamin W. Goossen's Chosen Nation tells the story of a small group of people with a strong sense of social separation and no unifying creed that used German nationalism to maintain their relevance and cohesion in the modern world. At the broadest level, Goossen uses the Mennonites of Germany to expose all types of collectivism—national, religious, or otherwise—“as decentered, multivalent, and fragmentary (5).” At the narrowest, Goossen demonstrate that the Mennonites of Germany were far from the principled and pacifist practitioners of piety that they are often presumed to be. In fact, the church's “urban, affluent, and well-educated leadership” (“Mennonite activists” according to Goossen) were quite willing to participate in World War I and eventually align the church with Nazi militarism and genocide (12).

An analogy in the introduction illuminates the analytical thrust of the book: Goossen describes how Germany's Mennonites transformed an old battle song, “Swing brothers, swing Germania's banner,” into a rousing and righteous hymn: “A holy inheritance remains always for us Mennonites.” According to Goossen, the song reveals “collectivism in its rawest form: a multivalent sound, changing pitch and timbre as it traveled from vocal chords to tongue to ear. If certain collectivities crystalized at a particular instant, they were likely to crumble moments later (11).” In other words, the Mennonites’ uncanny ability to adapt their faith to swiftly changing political circumstances challenges readers to question “what the idea of Mennonitism has meant for various observers (7)” over time to “understand how larger events rendered certain affiliations desirable, whether German [national], Mennonite [religious], or otherwise (17).”

The first three chapters describe how Germany's Mennonite activists used modern organizational tools to promote collectivism during the heady decades around German unification. Most important were the roles of missionary work, print culture, and the creation of a Mennonite Union, which at first suggested and then asserted the unity of Germany's Mennonites. Activists waged their campaign on two fronts: within recalcitrant Mennonite communities and between Mennonites and popular opinion that regarded Mennonites as national outsiders. Rhetorically adept, activists “believed they could protect their confession against the stunning barrages of hate leveled against Catholics, national minorities, Jews and other potential non-Germans” during Germany's infamous Kulturkampf (44). What emerged from their efforts was a sense that Mennonites were not only Germans but the perfect embodiment of German national character. “True Germanness, they argued, was not embodied by Catholic or Protestant state churches, but rather by the independent Mennonite congregations” who upheld the complete separation of church and state (46).

Chapter 4, “World War, World Confession,” shows how World War I tested and confirmed German Mennonite commitment to the state, but it also birthed the notion that the Germany was the homeland and guardian of German-speaking Mennonites abroad and especially in the newly-established Soviet Union. According to Goossen, “the plight of coreligionists in Russia became the defining disaster of the war for many of Germany's Mennonites (101).” With fresh wind in their sails, Mennonite activists were prepared to move from a position of defending their faith to supporting the offensive policies (in both senses of the word) of the Nazi state.

Goossen's exposé of Mennonites as Aryan “anti-Jews” in the Nazi imagination is the most provocative part of the book. James Irvin Lichti's 2008 Houses on the Sand?: Pacifist Denominations in Nazi Germany (Peter Lang inc.) showed us that Mennonites living in Germany succumbed to Nazi appeals for national unity, but the book's analytical shortcomings left a good deal of the story untold. Goossen relates it clearly and judiciously. Chapters 5 and 6, “The Racial Church” and “Fatherland,” describe the reasons why Nazi scholars believed Mennonites’ “church discipline and religious-racial defense system . . . protected one hundred percent against the dilution of their blood (131, quoting Mennonite activist Benjamin Unruh).” Goossen shows how flattered Mennonite activists transformed endogamy, isolation, and migration—historic badges of social alienation—into Aryan “Stars of David” that gave the scattered “Mennonite nation” privileges to settle the Nazi “Promised Land” of desolated Eastern Europe.

The book's biggest asset is its biggest liability, which is its mostly national and elite framework. Chosen Nation clearly shows how Mennonite collectivism transformed from elite assertions about Mennonites’ sociohistorical Germanness in the late nineteenth century to the church's racial-historical Germanness in the early 1940s. He also pays due to the transnationality of Mennonite communities—giving us examples of how Germany's Mennonitism reverberated in Russia, North America, and South America—but the book remains mostly grounded within the expanding and contracting territory of the German nation-state and the dealings of its educated, elite leadership. For example, Chosen Nation begins by describing a large contingent of rural and conservative Mennonites leaving Germany for Kansas in 1876, but we do not hear from them again—particularly in regard to their new understanding of Germanness in a foreign land and their status as non-resistant, German-speaking, Americans during World War I. For another, we learn that Mennonite activists recoiled when rural congregations in Alsace-Lorraine were “amputated” from their German homeland and reattached to France in 1919 but we do not hear their local voices (107). If Mennonite communities are nodes in a global network, then Goossen makes Germany its hub and the country's urban activists its chief networking officers.

Logically constructed, lucidly written, and well argued, Chosen Nation makes a solid case that “collectivist language held immense power. If strategically deployed and liberally received, it could structure self-conceptions and world outlooks, circumscribing entire communities’ range of political and intellectual motion (17).” As Germany's Mennonites traveled the twisted road from social outsiders during the Kaiserreich to racial darlings during the Third Reich, they poured their sense of collectivism from old religious wineskins into new vials of Aryan blood.